Cleanup crews begin cleaning up the mess caused by the MV Dali if it lost strength and crashed into the Franklin Key Bridge late last month. The first step? Only 140 of the 4,700 of them will be removed Containers on board– a process that is expected to take weeks.
Even with nearly 5,000 containers on board, the MV Dali was only half full of its capacity of 10,000 containers when it lost power and crashed into the bridge on March 26 Associated Press Reports. Still, that seems like a lot of shipping containers, and that’s just one ship; Tens of millions of these ubiquitous metal boxes are moving around the world at any given time.
Shipping containers are so common that they often fade into the background, but these humble 20 (or 40) foot long metal boxes are a new invention, and we can thank (or curse) them for creating the modern world. Forbes The shipping container was once called the greatest invention of the 20th century. The New York Times called the simple shipping container “… one of the most important but least noticed economic developments of the last decades” and the The US government says containers “…revolutionized the shipping industry.”
What makes shipping containers so revolutionary? First (my favorite part) a little story:
Until about 50 or 60 years ago, cargo was transported around the world in individual containers. Ships were a game of Tetris in which non-standard barrels, crates, pallets, and even entire cars were built into a cargo hold. The work was labor-intensive and time-consuming, requiring longshoremen days to properly stow and secure the cargo. This process was dangerous for dock workers, who often had no idea what materials they were handling, and costly for shipping companies. It also hit the customers’ wallets; They had to store goods in warehouses while they waited for shipment and distribution.
Malcom McLean is the founder of the North Carolina trucking company Sea-Land Service. He had the brilliant idea of standardizing shipping so that materials could easily be loaded onto ships, transferred to trucks, and then taken to distribution centers or directly to customers.
Although the innovation took time to catch on and there were inevitable missteps, the idea was too good not to implement. It is no exaggeration to say that McLean’s idea founded the modern globalized economy New York Times:
Just as the computer revolutionized the flow of information, the shipping container revolutionized the flow of goods. A container is as generic as the ones and zeros of computer code and can contain just about anything, from coffee beans to cell phone components. Through drastic cost reductions and greater reliability, container shipping enormously increased the volume of international trade and enabled complex supply chains.
“Low transportation costs help make it economically viable for a factory in China to produce Barbie dolls with Japanese hair, Taiwanese plastics and American dyes and ship them to eager girls around the world,” Marc Levinson writes in the new book “The Kasten: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Global Economy Bigger” (Princeton University Press).
This results in lower prices and more variety for consumers. “People now take for granted that they have access to a huge selection of goods from around the world,” Levinson said in an interview. This choice, he said, “was made possible by this technological change.”
This revolution, like every revolution, also had some dire, unforeseen consequences. Port cities that quickly embraced change boomed while other ports withered. Longshoremen lost their jobs, as did people who worked in local manufacturing. This suffered as companies found it was cheaper to build abroad and then ship the products rather than build at home.
Cargo ships grew to gigantic proportions to accommodate even more containers, which of course led to an increase in carbon dioxide pollution. According to the World Bank, cargo ships are now responsible for three percent of global emissions, similar to developed countries such as Japan and Germany.
These building-sized ships are also particularly problematic when carrying important ship infrastructure, such as: MV Ever Given incident in 2021 that shut down the Suez Canal for almost a week, or the collapse of the Franklin Key Bridge last month after the MV Dali crashed. Nowadays, so many goods are transported by shipping containers that a Lack of containers They themselves can affect global trade and have catastrophic consequences.
Not to mention the increase in cheap, often exploitative production, which has led to the mindless overconsumption that we all enjoy to this day, leading to more waste and more pollution.
Doesn’t seem like such a simple little box now, does it?